Nokia opening Ovi Store up to individuals rather than just VAT-registered companies?
A small quote on the Forum Nokia forum suggests that Nokia may be loosening the currently rather stringent requirements for publishing to Ovi: We are currently updating our platform to allow individual developers to publish in the Ovi Store. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please keep paying close attention to the Forum or other sources for Ovi Publish updates. Given the problems Nokia are facing with the “success” of their store compared with the iOS App Store and the Android Market, Nokia have to do something.
MeeGo open requirements process
maemo.org has used Bugzilla and Brainstorm to try and have an open specification process; but with so many plans being formed behind Nokia's closed doors, success for enhancement development was limited; usually because of incompatibilities with the "UI specification" for an application, or the lack of engagement of product managers. MeeGo, however, does have an open requirements gathering process, which was unveiled by Sami Pienimäki: As earlier published, an open Roadmapping will be run by the Working Groups of each category and the Core Program respectively. They are then working further with the public Feature Requests to turn them to Roadmap items and eventually to implementable engineering requirements. Based around Bugzilla, this should form the core of all the requirements gathering for MeeGo.
Hosting Maemo and MeeGo build systems together
David Greaves, Carsten Munk, Niels Breet and (your editor) Andrew Flegg have signed a joiend letter on behalf of the Maemo development community to push for the MeeGo and Maemo community build systems (running on OBS) to be co-located and co-managed: the benefits of supporting a smooth transition for the vibrant Maemo development community would be worthwhile both for MeeGo and Maemo: developers would be able to use the OBS' natural ability to target Fremantle, Harmattan and MeeGo from a single location. This would bring more developers and their applications to MeeGo sooner. [...] The potential hiccup is that most Maemo applications need some form of closed package in the autobuilder (at some level) from Nokia to build. MeeGo is supposed to be an open source project, so would this cause a conflict of interest? Fortunately, response from the MeeGo community has been wholly positive, with the numerous benefits outweighing any perceived downsides. Indeed, it might be that the signatories were worried more about the response than was necessary or, like most things, it could only cause problems once enacted.
MeeGo developer "buddy" system proposed
Robin Burchell has launched an initiative to ease the transition to MeeGo and Qt development for developers: We have a lot of highly productive developers that are not sure how their skills will remain relevant in a MeeGo context. We can't afford to lose them through neglect. There are also even more developers not familiar with MeeGo. When they find us, we have to grab them and keep them. Basically, we can't afford to lose our developers, and we need to gain more. I need help. I've written tutorials and helped a lot of people Those interested in mentoring new MeeGo developers should get in touch with Robin.
PyMaemo's guide to packaging Python applications without Scratchbox
The INdT team behind the continually successful Python port and frameworks have published a tool - and a guide - to building packages of Python applications on Linux, without the overhead of Scratchbox or MADDE. Their alternative is using stdeb, a set of extensions to distutils that allows generating Debian packages, both binary and source, that can be installed on the device or sent to the extras-devel repository. This tutorial will show how to integrate it into your project, build the packages and upload them to extras-devel. Unlike other solutions, such as py2deb, this builds the source necessary for uploading to the maemo.org Extras autobuilder and a binary package which can be directly tested on a device (or simulator).